Dialectical Laughter: A Study of Endgame

Abstract

"Let's get as many laughs as we can out of this horrible mess," Becken told the actor playing Hamm during the 1964 London production of Endgame,' a statement which echoes Nell's speech to Nagg within the play that "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness ... it's the most comical thing in the world." But Beckett wants his audience to start laughing and Nell wants Nagg to stop. Unhappiness is so constant she tells him, "like the funny story we have heard too often," that we can finally laugh no more even though "we still find it funny ... "(pp. 18-19). Nell laughs only once during the play, less than any of the other characters who are themselves infrequent laughers but not yet at her level of exhaustion (or wisdom). Beckett's audience, to take the testimony of reviewers and critics, laughs much more often. Nagg listens to Nell's speech without comprehension and Beckett's audience may have similar problems with it, for her concept is difficult, the most comical which is also the least laughable, and the audience's situation is difficult, the spectators prodded to laugh by a play that shows characters on stage prodded to stop laughing. The tears and laughs of the world are a constant quantity, Pozzo announces in Wairing for Godor, and "For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh" (p. 22). It is this principle of the conservation of psychic energy that Endgame illustrates.